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To play devil’s/react-dev’s advocate: the appeal of local-first is that you can easily configure which business logic you want done on the server, leaving anyth

by bbor 2y ago

To play devil’s/react-dev’s advocate: the appeal of local-first is that you can easily configure which business logic you want done on the server, leaving anything that can be done on the client to the client for latency and cloud bill reasons. javascript lacked (lacks?) even the basics of a practical programming language -- real packages and the like Interesting. As a typescript user with a million npm packages this surprises me. In the sense of “managed dependencies” JS/TS has tons of packages, but I’m getting the sense that you mean something else? Like, splitting up your code into packages gets you some performance benefit in other languages? I have python packages (read: __init__.py files) in my Flask app, but I’m not sure I’ve ever missed them in TS - am I missing some big picture? In general web bundling is so complex I tend to treat it as a black box, so that could easily be on me. you're re-inventing wheels (like routing, rendering, a request/response paradigm) that the browser does for you, for free. I’m having trouble seeing what you mean here. I know the typical “implementing an SPA is tough because you have to fake pathname manipulation/history” warnings, but I think you’re going a step beyond that. React does rendering on a way more performant level than browsers if you’re just changing subsets of the DOM, and I’m really not sure what you mean by the “request/response” paradigm at all, sorry. SPAs do have to handle async requests on the client and normal websites make the server do that when building the page, but ultimately the difference seems slight. What am I missing? for the vast majority of CRUD websites I mean, do people making crud websites really need any frameworks, and do they browse hacker news? Aren’t static sites a pretty solved problem by people like WordPress? Seems like the hard part of that would just be writing content and filling templates, maybe some styling — not any engineering work.

rgbrgb 2y ago
Agree with you pushing back on the TS hate. The ecosystem and tooling have gotten very mature and very productive IMO for building UIs. However, static sites are by definition not CRUD sites and yes I would guess most HN web devs make CRUD sites. And I would submit that in 2024 there is still not a rails-level happy path for doing that in ts (though Redwood is trying).
timr 2y ago
> Interesting. As a typescript user with a million npm packages this surprises me. In the sense of “managed dependencies” JS/TS has tons of packages, but I’m getting the sense that you mean something else? The very fact that you cite Typescript (itself a hack built on top of Javascript to make up for its deficiencies), and npm (a third-party packaging system...since, you know...JS doesn't/didn't have one), is just emphasizing my point. Setting aside the goodness or badness of either of these things, you're so immersed in the complexity of all of the hacks that you don't even see it anymore. It's the old joke about the fish and water. Imagine a world where packages and types were a built-in, first-class feature of the language...oh wait.
- bbor 2y ago
  What language has a built in dependency system…? How would that even work? I’m confused. Every dependency system is a registry of dependencies vetted by some group, along with one or more compilers/runtimes that know how to speak that group’s format. Who cares if the group is GitHub (TIL… ew, tbf) vs. the language nonprofit itself? Also, more importantly by far: can you point me to what language(s) you’re talking about? C++ doesn’t seem to have a “built in” dependency manager, just vcpkg and Conan. Python has poetry, anaconda, and pip, the latter of which is run by the Python nonprofit — but something tells me that’s not the old school classic you’re referencing lol. Java has ant, gradle, and Maven, none of which seem official. I guess we’re talking about ruby, since their manager is published by a group that claims ownership of the language (https://rubycentral.org/ https://rubycentral.org/)? Basically I’m still not sure what im missing. I very much might be a fish in water, and I am a newbie to all of this, relatively! But I’ve never once noticed a real difference in the languages I’ve developed in professionally (those mentioned above, minus ruby) so I’m not sure what ruby’s being more “first-class” gets me. At a certain point, if your build system is setup using boilerplate, then the two steps are 1. Download package, 2. Import package into relevant file and start calling its members. What part of that can be improved?
  - timr 2y ago
    > What language has a built in dependency system…? Literally every language with support for modules that extend across files has some form of dependency management. Even C -- simple as it is -- has headers and source files which separate interface from implementation. Some languages go further (e.g. Ruby), and have far more developed, standard systems of version management built right in -- rubygems will do the graph analysis of your module includes, resolve dependency cycles, enforce versioning, and so on. Python is a total mess when it comes to high-level dependency management, but only because it offers 3-4 different "standard" ways of doing it! Notably, Javascript didn't even have the the export or import keywords until ES6 (2015). It had literally no support for even the primitive, C-like version of the idea, and there were multiple competing implementations of it, from Node, to CommonJS, to RequireJS, Webpack, Babel and so on. But you still can't get rid of webpack, though -- JS has no built-in notion of minification or tree pruning, so that's all still implemented via a panoply of third-party tools.

by bbor 2y ago

rgbrgb 2y ago

Agree with you pushing back on the TS hate. The ecosystem and tooling have gotten very mature and very productive IMO for building UIs. However, static sites are by definition not CRUD sites and yes I would guess most HN web devs make CRUD sites. And I would submit that in 2024 there is still not a rails-level happy path for doing that in ts (though Redwood is trying).

timr 2y ago

> Interesting. As a typescript user with a million npm packages this surprises me. In the sense of “managed dependencies” JS/TS has tons of packages, but I’m getting the sense that you mean something else? The very fact that you cite Typescript (itself a hack built on top of Javascript to make up for its deficiencies), and npm (a third-party packaging system...since, you know...JS doesn't/didn't have one), is just emphasizing my point. Setting aside the goodness or badness of either of these things, you're so immersed in the complexity of all of the hacks that you don't even see it anymore. It's the old joke about the fish and water. Imagine a world where packages and types were a built-in, first-class feature of the language...oh wait.

bbor 2y ago
What language has a built in dependency system…? How would that even work? I’m confused. Every dependency system is a registry of dependencies vetted by some group, along with one or more compilers/runtimes that know how to speak that group’s format. Who cares if the group is GitHub (TIL… ew, tbf) vs. the language nonprofit itself? Also, more importantly by far: can you point me to what language(s) you’re talking about? C++ doesn’t seem to have a “built in” dependency manager, just vcpkg and Conan. Python has poetry, anaconda, and pip, the latter of which is run by the Python nonprofit — but something tells me that’s not the old school classic you’re referencing lol. Java has ant, gradle, and Maven, none of which seem official. I guess we’re talking about ruby, since their manager is published by a group that claims ownership of the language (https://rubycentral.org/ https://rubycentral.org/)? Basically I’m still not sure what im missing. I very much might be a fish in water, and I am a newbie to all of this, relatively! But I’ve never once noticed a real difference in the languages I’ve developed in professionally (those mentioned above, minus ruby) so I’m not sure what ruby’s being more “first-class” gets me. At a certain point, if your build system is setup using boilerplate, then the two steps are 1. Download package, 2. Import package into relevant file and start calling its members. What part of that can be improved?
- timr 2y ago
  > What language has a built in dependency system…? Literally every language with support for modules that extend across files has some form of dependency management. Even C -- simple as it is -- has headers and source files which separate interface from implementation. Some languages go further (e.g. Ruby), and have far more developed, standard systems of version management built right in -- rubygems will do the graph analysis of your module includes, resolve dependency cycles, enforce versioning, and so on. Python is a total mess when it comes to high-level dependency management, but only because it offers 3-4 different "standard" ways of doing it! Notably, Javascript didn't even have the the export or import keywords until ES6 (2015). It had literally no support for even the primitive, C-like version of the idea, and there were multiple competing implementations of it, from Node, to CommonJS, to RequireJS, Webpack, Babel and so on. But you still can't get rid of webpack, though -- JS has no built-in notion of minification or tree pruning, so that's all still implemented via a panoply of third-party tools.